Tag Archives: University of Virginia

An adjunct lecturer at the University of Virginia was forced to take a leave of absence because his criticism of Black Lives Matter in a Facebook post was “inappropriate” and “inconsistent with the University of Virginia’s values.” The lecturer, Douglas Muir, had been teaching at the university’s Darden School of Business and the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Muir’s Facebook post, now deleted but quoted by the Cavalier Daily, asserted that “Black lives matter is the biggest rasist organisation [sic] since the clan [sic]. Are you kidding me. Disgusting!!!” Muir was responding to comments about a lecture given by Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza.

Undermines Our Values

Muir’s statement is obviously provocative (not to mention poorly spelled), and his rapid resignation suggests that the University of Virginia’s vaunted dedication to free speech and “inclusion” does not extend to provocative posts on social media.

“While free speech and open discussion are fundamental principles of our nation and the University,” a late Friday statement from the Dean of Engineering and Applied Science declared, “Mr. Muir’s comment was entirely inappropriate. UVA Engineering does not condone actions that undermine our values, dedication to diversity and educational mission.” The School of Engineering apparently regards a Facebook post as an “action,” not speech, and it deems only “appropriate” speech and speech that does not challenge “diversity” worthy of protection.

A statement from UVa Provost Tom Katsouleas was even more smarmy: Muir’s comment “is inconsistent with the University of Virginia’s values and with its commitment to the principles of academic freedom…. This position in no way squelches academic freedom, which welcomes dissent and encourages the voices of others whose perspectives may differ from ours — thereby adding new insights to our own. But statements such as Mr. Muir’s do not foster intellectual exploration, nor do they encourage the voices of others.”

What about Alicia Garza?

The fundamental question, in short, is not whether Black Lives Matter is or is not like the Klan. It is whether provosts and deans should be in the business of awarding or withholding UVa’s imprimatur of approval on highly charged political speech and empowered to decide which points of view are legitimate and which are “inappropriate” or “inconsistent with the University of Virginia’s values” or “do not foster intellectual exploration.”

But even if speech is to be monitored and regulated, that cannot be done in a discriminatory manner. In dismissing Mr. Muir because of his criticism of Black Lives Matter, however, UVa seems to be clearly engaged in content-based discrimination, since not only does it not ban but in fact welcomes speech that is equally if not more offensive.

Consider, for example, the typical invective of Alicia Garza, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter whose recent appearance provoked Muir’s rant. For example, responding to Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention this summer, Garza stated that “[t]he terrifying vision that Donald J. Trump is putting forward casts him alongside some of the worst fascists in history…. Trump is proposing a new, dark age where police have carte blanche authority to terrorize our communities.”

Garza is obviously fond of comparing Trump to Hitler because she does sorepeatedly. And her target is not simply Trump — whom her friend and co-founder of Black Lives Matter Patrisse Cullors calls “a terrorist” — but also Trump’s supporters. “There’s millions of people backing a fascist ideologue,” Garza told Bloomberg News, anticipating by a month BLM supporter Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” description of the same voters.

In a similar vein, no doubt intended to “foster intellectual exploration” and “encourage the voices of others,” Garza responded in The Guardian to those fascists who insist that all lives matter by declaring that “[b]y and large, I’m starting to feel like, if somebody doesn’t want to f***ing understand — excuse my language — if somebody can’t see the contradiction of saying all lives matter … then they’re just wilfully [sic] being ignorant, and an a****le. If a movement can be judged by its heroes, what does it say about Black Lives Matter that Garza proudly asserts that she uses Assata Shakur’s “powerful demand in my organizing work”? Here’s a description of Shakur, originally known as Joanne Chesimard, from the FBI Most Wanted List:

“On May 2, 1973, Chesimard, who was part of a revolutionary extremist organization known as the Black Liberation Army, and two accomplices were stopped for a motor vehicle violation on the New Jersey Turnpike by two troopers with the New Jersey State Police. At the time, Chesimard was wanted for her involvement in several felonies, including bank robbery. Chesimard and her accomplices opened fire on the troopers. One trooper was wounded and the other was shot and killed execution-style at point-blank range.”

Chesimard was convicted of first-degree murder, but in 1979 she escaped from prison and fled to Cuba. Despite pressure to do so, President Obama refused to demand the return of Chesimard as part of his opening relations with Cuba, a decision supported by Hillary Clinton.

My point, it should go without saying, is not that Alicia Garza should be barred from speaking at University events, although I do think it odd that UVa’s Office of Diversity and Equity invited her to be keynote speaker at a Community celebration of Martin Luther King last winter (cancelled because of a scheduling conflict). Rather, it is the question of whether university administrators should be empowered to decide whether comparing the Black Lives Matter movement to the Klan is really beyond the pale of legitimate debate and discourse.

If BLM’s critics are not allowed to compare it to the Klan, what of its supporters? What, for example, will the protectors of UVa’s values do when celebrated Selma director Ava DuVernay’s new film about the incarceration of blacks, 13th, is shown in Charlottesville and predictably elicits some faculty gushing? According to the New York Post, it “wowed audiences at the New York Film Festival and looks like a leading Oscar contender,” no doubt in part because of its “[e]quating Donald Trump supporters with Deep South Lynch mobs.” Could a UVa faculty member now make that equation?

Is There Free Speech at UVa?

In any event, if UVa’s Provost and Deans insist that a Lecturer’s personal comments on social media must not be inconsistent with the University’s values, why are they not concerned that an official University invitation to Garza to be a keynote speaker at a University event might lead some observers to infer endorsement of her extreme views? Would they dismiss any untenured faculty members who posted or tweeted some of the things Garza says all the time?

No doubt the now problematic standing of free speech at “Mr. Jefferson’s University” will be subject of some discussion at a long-scheduled Symposium on Free Speech on Campus in Charlottesville on October 13-14 sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Speech. How embarrassing, not to mention ironic, if in the coming year would earn one of the Jefferson Center’s noted and notorious Muzzle Awards.

The University of Virginia’s “Finals Weekend” — what other schools call graduation — is upon us. Not far behind, no doubt, will be the annual accolades such as the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education’s report that “The University of Virginia consistently posts the highest Black student graduation rate of any state-operated university in the country.” And this has been true “over the past 20 years.”

There is a dark side to this accomplishment. Last June, for example, the African American graduation rate was 80.3% — as usual, the highest in the country among public institutions — but no one seemed to notice that the corresponding 19.7% rate at which blacks failed to graduate in four years was twice as high as the rate for Asians (9.5%) and whites (10.9%). Thus, according to UVa’s Institutional Assessment data, of the 218 blacks who entered in 2011, 43 of them did not graduate in 2015. The six-year graduation rates for the 250 blacks entering in 2009 were better (88.8%), but the rate at which they failed to graduate (11.2%) remained more than twice as high as the rate for whites (5.4%).

The fact that blacks fail to graduate at twice the rate of whites and Asians at UVa even though it boasts the highest black graduation rate of any public university strongly suggests the presence and effect of “mismatch” that Richard Sander and others have documented — that any group admitted to selective institutions with much lower academic qualifications than their peers will cluster at the bottom of their classes and sustain higher failure rates.

The fact that UVa each year admits a much higher proportion of black applicants than Asians and whites indicates that it is indeed lowering the admissions bar for blacks. In the twelve classes entering from the fall of 2000 through 2011 (to mirror the four-year graduation rates discussed above), an average 33.9% of white applicants were offered admission, but for blacks the offer rate was 54.3%. In the most recent data available, which I discussed here, UVa offered early admission to 29.7% of the white applicants to the class of 2020 and 42.5% of the blacks.

It is theoretically conceivable — but highly unlikely — that there is a non-discriminatory explanation for the racial preference revealed by these admission proportions. But UVa, like most (perhaps all?) similar institutions, makes it impossible to analyze the nature and degree of racial preference it offers by refusing to publish SAT scores and other academic qualification data by race, even though it clearly has the data. Similarly, it publishes student GPA by gender but not by race. And, as I observed on Minding The Campus a few months ago, “it will be a freezing day in July in Charlottesville before UVa voluntarily releases test scores, etc., by race.”

Well, it is not yet freezing in July, but I have just received a small taste of SAT scores by race from UVa. I shared my Minding The Campus piece linked above with Steve Landes, my Delegate in the Virginia General Assembly, who is interested in this issue and who forwarded my piece with questions to the University’s government relations office. Since Del. Landes is Chairman of the House of Delegates Education Committee and Vice Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, his queries tend to be answered promptly.

Laura Fornash, Executive Assistant to the President for State Governmental relations (and former Virginia Secretary of Education), sent the math plus verbal results, by race, for the students admitted to the class entering next fall, along with the observation that not all students take the SAT and that UVa’s racial range is not surprising given the results nationally. And indeed the results are not surprising:

African Americans

1154

White

1353

Asian

1397

There is not, of course, a perfect correlation between SAT scores and graduation rates, but those scores are a significant component and indicator of academic qualifications, and there is compelling evidence that raising academic requirements raises the probability of graduation.

Peter Salins, former Provost of the State University of New York system, provided strong evidence for that correlation in an Op-ed in The New York Times. In the 1990s, he wrote, “several SUNY campuses chose to raise their admissions standards by requiring higher SAT scores, while others opted to keep them unchanged,” thus providing “a controlled experiment of sorts that can fairly conclusively tell us whether SAT scores were accurate predictors of whether a student would get a degree.”

The short answer, he stated, is “yes, they were.” Campuses that raised the emphasis on the SAT experienced “remarkable improvements” in graduation rates, especially at the more selective campuses, ranging “from 10 percent (at Stony Brook, where the six-year graduation rate went to 59.2 percent from 53.8 percent) to 95 percent (at Old Westbury, which went to 35.9 percent from 18.4 percent).” The results were clear, Salins concluded. “[O]nly those campuses whose incoming students’ SAT scores improved substantially saw gains in graduation rates.”

Worse After Prop. 209

The results in California after Prop. 209 outlawed racial preferences were even more dramatic, and more on point for UVa.

For the whole University of California system: blacks who entered in 1996 (before Prop. 209) had a four-year graduation rate of 26.5%. For the class entering in 2001, after Prop. 209, the black graduation rate increased to 38.6%. Six-year rates increased from 64% to 70.2%. Looking at a wider swath of this data, Richard Sander noted that “For the six cohorts of black freshmen who started at UC campuses before Prop 209 went into effect (the matriculating years of 1992 through 1997), the average four-year graduation rate was only 22.2%. For the years since 1998 (matriculating years 1998 through 2005), the black four-year graduation rate across the UC system is 39.4% — a near doubling. For Hispanics the four-year graduation numbers are 27.2% for 1992-97, and 41.8% for 1998-2005.”

UC San Diego. The four-year black graduation rate increased from 37.7% for the class entering in 1996 to 51.4% for the class entering in 2001. The six-year rate went from 69.8% to 78.8%.

UCLA. The four-year black graduation rate increased from 31.1% for the 1996 class to 53.7% for the 2001 class.

UC Berkeley. The four-year black graduation rate increased from 28.8% for the 1996 class to 35% for the 2001 class.

The improvement in black graduation rates at the University of California would likely have been even more dramatic but for the widespread “holisticcheating” and evasion. Indeed, in researching their “magisterial” book, Mismatch, Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. found so much cheating that they concluded outright bans of affirmative action are not likely to work.

“[B]ecause of universities’ determination to circumvent any ban,” they argue (p. 279), outlawing preferences would not end them but would lead — and has led — to universities evading bans, thus possibly making mismatch much worse, not better.” The post-209 experience in California, however, suggests that such bans are like speed limits: they may not restrict speed to the posted limit, but they do make drivers drive slower than they otherwise would.

High Cost to Students and Taxpayers

Admitting minorities with higher SAT scores after Prop. 209 was not the only cause of their higher graduation rates, but it would be unreasonable to assume it was not a significant component. Thus one of the most disturbing aspects of UVa’s — or any university’s — continuing year after year to admit cohorts of minority students with much lower SAT scores than their peers is that administrators know that a high but reasonably predictable portion of them will fail to get degrees, with a high cost not only to the students and their families but also the taxpayers who support public education.

The reason UVa and others continue to do so, even armed as they are with this knowledge, is, of course, their determination to provide a sufficient degree of pigmentary “diversity,” whatever the cost. A very large, very disappointing, part of that cost at UVa are the 832 black students who entered from 2000 through 2011 who failed to get a degree, a failure to graduate rate of 25.5% of the 3,266 blacks who were admitted over those twelve years. Assuming as I do that many if not most of those 832 students would not have been admitted but for their race, I believe they are just as much victims of “diversity” as the equal number of whites and Asians who would have been admitted but for their race.

Laura Fornash, UVa’s assistant to the president for state governmental relations, agreed with my February Minding The Campus piece that the reason for UVa’s higher admit rate for blacks was that its yield rate was lower than for whites (36.4% vs. 44.5% for next fall’s entering class, she reported), since blacks qualified to go to UVa were heavily courted by other institutions. But that reason is a justification only if one assumes that UVa must have a large enough number of blacks to meet its self-imposed “diversity” obligation.

‘Diversity Uses Blacks for the Benefit of Whites’

What these diversity-justified preferences amount to in practice is admitting a large cohort of blacks knowing that a high percentage of them will not graduate so that there will be a sufficient number of them to provide “diversity” to whites, Asians, and others. “Let me state bluntly,” I stated bluntly back in 2002, “diversity uses blacks for the benefit of whites.”

Minorities admitted who would not have been admitted but for their race (the purpose and effect of affirmative action) are not admitted, after all, to provide “diversity” to themselves. Whatever benefit they derive from being in a “diverse” student body they would also receive if they attended a less selective majority-white institution where they would have a better chance of graduating.

If UVa treated all applicants without regard to their race or ethnicity, it would have what it must believe are too few blacks and too many Asians. (Whether or not it has too few or too many Jews, Mormons, Muslims, Methodists, Missouri Synod Lutherans, or transgender males is not known, because apparently neither religion nor gender identification (at least for now) is regarded as a relevant enough source of “diversity” to count.

What Is to Be Done?

In an ideal world — or even one that merely attempted to live up to what Gunnar Myrdal called “The American Creed” — benefits and burdens would not be distributed (especially by public institutions) on the basis of race, a principle the citizens of California, Michigan, Nebraska , and Arizona enshrined in their state constitutions. But sadly, the world we live in is far from ideal.

Nevertheless, since most Americans believe that government should be transparent, a worthy and achievable goal is to require state institutions and even private universities that receive public funds to publish data, such as SAT scores and class rank, revealing how heavily they put their thumbs on the racial scale. “It’s outrageous that public universities are not transparent about whether, and how, and how heavily they treat students differently on the basis of skin color and what country their ancestors came from,”

Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity argues (in an email to me, quoted with permission) — especially because, he continued, “the victims of this lack of transparency are the supposed ‘beneficiaries‘ of the discrimination — who are not told that their chances of graduation and getting good grades will be substantially less than other students’.” Conveniently, Clegg and Hans von Spakovsky have written a draft model “sunshine bill” that provides a good starting point for consideration of such legislation.

Universities, in short, should at least be required to publish data that would provide prospective applicants with information about the fate of students with qualifications similar to their own. UVa has just released SAT scores by race for one year. It would be enormously helpful to prospective applicants, their parents, and school counselors to have that data for every year, broken down by ranges of scores, which would allow useful correlations with the graduation rate data already provided. I suspect students of whatever race or ethnicity with similar SAT scores would have similar graduation rates, but since UVa and most other universities refuse to release that data voluntarily, it is impossible to confirm that suspicion.

It is easy to understand the institutional reluctance. After all, some black students may be reluctant to attend UVa if they knew in advance that their chance of failing to obtain a degree were two times higher than whites or Asians and that they would have an equal chance at less selective institutions where their qualifications equaled those of their peers.

Randall Kennedy’s View

It is less easy to understand the willingness, even eagerness, of zealous affirmative action advocates to sacrifice those mismatched students who predictably fail to earn degrees. Consider the argument, for example, of Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, whose book, For Discrimination, I reviewed here, “The Odd Career Of Randall Kennedy.”

Kennedy supports the preferential admission of black law students even if “mismatch” results in the production of fewer black lawyers because, he wrote, most of the preferentially admitted do graduate and “the cadre of black attorneys trained at the top-tier schools are more valuable to the black community than those trained at the lower-tier schools, and hence, if necessary, maintaining the numbers at the higher-tier schools would be worth sacrificing marginal members or potential members of the black bar.”

Perhaps many “marginal” potential UVa students would agree with that view, but since a few — and their tuition-paying parents — may not, UVa should publish the data allowing them to decide for themselves.

Finally some defenses of the beleaguered University of Virginia Board of Visitors are beginning to appear. An editorial in the Washington Post half-heartedly and with notable lack of enthusiasm called for Teresa Sullivan’s reinstatement, but the next day it ran an OpEd piece by Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, noting that “[w]hile the university board’s opaque process in removing Sullivan is regrettable, the board is right to be concerned about the direction of the university” and that “[f]aculty and administrators are up in arms, but these same individuals have, for decades, resisted cutting costs and providing accountability.”